Nielsen's Arcadia: the Case of the Flute Concerto

NIELSEN’S ARCADIA: THE CASE OF THE FLUTE CONCERTO The fl ute cannot deny its own nature, its home is in Arcadia and it prefers pastoral moods. Hence, the composer has to obey its gentle nature, unless he wants to be branded a barbarian.1 By Ryan Ross Nielsen’s own remarks concerning his Flute Concerto (composed for and premiered by Holger Gilbert-Jespersen in 1926) have often appeared alongside descriptions of the work. The music’s often sudden moments of lyricism seem to relate well to his invocation of the terms ‘pastoral’ and ‘Arcadia’. However, while the concerto has recently been subjected to some fascinating examinations,2 its ‘Arcadian’ nature as explicitly professed by Nielsen has barely been explored.3 In this essay I shall suggest that there are distinct patterns pertaining to the Flute Concerto involving the idea of ‘Arcadia’ as it contrasts an idyllic past with a troubled present. In my analysis, I will argue that his positioning of simple themes with relation to their surroundings in the concerto’s two movements suggests a process-driven search for an Arcadian ideal. As such, and 1 Fløjten kan ikke fornægte sin Natur, den hører hjemme i Arkadien og foretrækker de pastorale Stemninger; Komponisten er derefter nødt til at rette sig efter det blide Væ- sen, ifald han ikke vil risikere at stemples som en Barbar. This and other remarks Nielsen made about his Flute Concerto may be found in Carl Nielsen Works II/9: Concertos, Copenhagen 2002, xxxiii-xxxiv. 2 Two such studies were published in Carl Nielsen Studies 2 (2005) – Tom Pan- kurst, ‘“We Never Know Where We’ll End Up”: Nielsen’s alternative end- ings to the Flute Concerto’, 132-151; and Kirsten Flensborg Petersen, ‘Carl Nielsen’s Flute Concerto: Form and revision of the ending’, 196-225. Both studies present valuable insights into the creative process of the work, with the former heavily exploring tonal/harmonic issues and the latter closely examining revisions for the fi nale. My essay is concerned primarily with the fi nished product and its aesthetic qualities as suggested by Nielsen. 3 In her D.M.A. dissertation, Beth E. Chandler examines the Flute Concerto and other works in terms of some neoclassic and other retrospective tenden- cies. See Chandler, The ‘Arcadian Flute’: Late Style in Carl Nielsen’s Works for Flute, D.M.A. diss., University of Cincinnati, 2004, 92-136. This essay will go further in exploring the concepts of simplicity and Arcadia, and how they bring to bear upon specifi c musical processes in the Flute Concerto. 280 CCNS_V_indmad_farver.inddNS_V_indmad_farver.indd 280280 330/07/120/07/12 116.386.38 Nielsen’s Arcadia: The Case of the Flute Concerto far from merely being an interesting work with several beautiful moments, the concerto is an important access point both for further understanding Nielsen’s creative approach to form and his late-period preoccupation with the idea of simplicity. Nielsen’s invoking of ‘Arcadia’ with regard to the fl ute and the concerto he wrote for it is signifi cant in light of the term’s background. In the classical literary tradition, Arcadia was based upon an actual region in southwest Greece celebrated on account of its beautiful landscape and its agrarian inhabitants. It became the home of the shepherd god Pan and other fantastical characters in tune with their natural surroundings. On the authority of Virgil’s Eclogues, Arcadia came to stand in Renaissance pastoral tradition for a fi gurative and idealized rural world in which shepherds and others live a leisurely existence according to upper-class sensibilities.4 As a connoisseur of classical culture, Nielsen probably knew the Eclogues and possibly Theocritus’ Idylls (which served as a model for Virgil’s pastoral poetry), being familiar with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and going so far to create a symphonic poem based on one of its pastoral episodes – Pan and Syrinx, Op. 49, fi rst performed early in 1918.5 Certain of his written comments, addressed below, also suggest that Nielsen’s conception of Arcadia included the juxtaposing a troubled reality with mythic para- dises and happy innocence. This is a manifestation of its ‘Golden Age’ aspect that often appears in more recent literature.6 Comparing Arcadia to childhood, Brian Loughrey writes: ‘Perhaps the most infl uential form of the new pastoralism has been the cult of the child. Post-Romantic conceptions of childhood, as a state of natural innocence, joy, and wisdom, corrupted by entry into the adult world, allowed the child to usurp the traditional role of the shepherd.’7 Peter V. Marinelli sees Arcadia in similar fashion: ‘The issues of the great world of adulthood are transported into Arcadia or into the magic gardens of childhood as to a place and time in which they may be better scruti- nized; they are given an objectifi cation by being isolated, and the process may result in a clarifi cation of the motives that bred the desire for escape in the fi rst place.’8 4 Helen Cooper outlines Renaissance uses of Arcadia in pastoral poetry as contrasted with nature-writing in medieval literature. See Cooper, Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance, Ipswich, UK: 1977, 105-106. 5 Daniel M. Grimley in Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism, Woodbridge 2010, Chapter 3, discusses Nielsen’s relationship with Hellenic culture and men- tions his 1899-1900 visit to Rome (p. 75). 6 The ideas of Arcadia and a Golden Age are recurrent themes in Renato Poggi- oli’s volume on pastoral literature – The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal, Cambridge 1975. Poggioli considers these concepts against a wide swath of literature from both ancient and later times, including post- Classical authors such as Cervantes, Rousseau, Goethe, Gogol, and others. 7 Brian Loughrey, ‘Introduction,’ in Brian Loughrey (ed.), The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook, London and Basingstoke 1984, 21. 8 Peter V. Marinelli, ‘Pastoral’, in John D. Jump (ed.), The Critical Idiom Series, London 1971, 11-12. 281 CCNS_V_indmad_farver.inddNS_V_indmad_farver.indd 281281 330/07/120/07/12 116.386.38 Ryan Ross In nineteenth-century pastoral poetry, such Arcadian patterns are discernible in how some writers contrasted past innocence with contemporary anxieties. One thinks perhaps of William Wordsworth’s ode Intimations of Immortality or Matthew Arnold’s The Scholar-Gipsy, both of which position idyllic nature and rural fi gures as a means with which to idealize the special qualities of childhood on the one hand, and a past age associated with a youthful friend on the other. I am convinced that the concept of Arcadia as a dichotomy of idyllic past ver- sus troubled present is a helpful way to view Nielsen’s Flute Concerto. Such a perspec- tive owes much to key discussions in primary and secondary sources. In Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism, Daniel Grimley closely examines the rural aspects of the Sinfonia espansiva and Springtime on Funen, among other works. Two intriguing lines of argument he makes, in conjunction with considering Danish visual art, are to con- nect Nielsen’s invocation of landscape in the symphony to a ‘seasonal cycle of growth and decay’ and that in Springtime in Funen to invoking ‘cultural memory’ as a ‘source of renewal’ and a point of new departure.9 These compositions, in his analysis, tran- scend the mere portrayal of physical landscape commonly associated with negatively- viewed provincialism. Instead, Grimley emphasizes the importance of dynamic, time- related themes that hold the past and present in the same frame. The Sinfonia espansiva and Springtime on Funen offer multiple points of similar- ity with the concept of Arcadia as outlined above. The latter work certainly references and even idealizes a cultural past in which Nielsen was reared. Also, the composer explicitly invoked a primal paradise when he claimed that the second movement of the Sinfonia espansiva, marked ‘Andante pastorale,’ was inspired by the Garden of Eden before the fall of Adam and Eve. This shows that even before his last years the idea of a past Arcadian wholeness later lost claimed a place in his musical imagination. How- ever, these works do not feature the sharp juxtapositions of the kind found in the later symphonies and concerti. While one could argue that Nielsen’s professed ode to Danish farmers’ hard work in the fi nal movement of the Sinfonia espansiva embodies a present, toil-fi lled rural reality (a kind of musical ‘Georgic’) that contrasts with the pre-fall bliss of Eden associated with the second movement, the characteristic con- fl icts of the later orchestral works are largely absent here. In these two compositions, then, the distant past – on the one hand fondly remembered and idealized, and on the other merely imagined – fi nds little or no harsh modern presence against which to provide a particularly Arcadian duality in the sense presently under discussion. Such contrasts are arguably observed most keenly in Nielsen’s late career and music. There are defi nite signs that this was a time especially characterized by refl ec- tion, in which he penned a memoir, My Childhood on Funen. This volume appeared in 9 Daniel M. Grimley, op. cit., 132-177. 282 CCNS_V_indmad_farver.inddNS_V_indmad_farver.indd 282282 330/07/120/07/12 116.386.38 Nielsen’s Arcadia: The Case of the Flute Concerto 1926, the year he completed his Flute Concerto. In it he explicitly and fondly recalls scenes from childhood fi ltered through the lens of adult wisdom and experience. It arrived after a lifetime of personal and professional hardships for Nielsen that included protracted marital diffi culties, a long struggle for respect as an orchestral musician, and health setbacks including ongoing cardiac problems.

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